


In Memory

by SilverDagger



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Ficlet, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 16:14:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2699270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three old friends meet to drink and commemorated the dead. </p><p>Written for the prompt <a href="http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/273536.html?thread=10265984#cmt10265984">inherit the earth</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Memory

"I still dream of her sometimes," Tifa says.

They're in the new bar in Kalm, closed for the evening to accommodate old friends, and she doesn't need to say who she means for Cloud and Barret to share a long look across the table, wordless communication and the ease of long familiarity. She pours them all another round and takes her place at the table, sandwiched between the two of them.

Cloud is silent, as he so seldom is these days, and Tifa wonders if she should have said anything at all. His eyes are luminous in the dim light, though warmer than they once were, less adrift; he's been changed by the Shinra, the world's end, the rebuilding after. They all have, and that thought, tonight, carries an edge of melancholy it doesn't usually have. Barret shrugs like he's rolling some old weight off his shoulders, takes a long drink, and says, "still dream of all of 'em. But her, yeah - it ain't the same, is it?"

"No," she says quietly. "It really isn't."

The truth is, those dreams are a world away from the streets outside; Tifa goes to sleep in Kalm and opens her eyes in Midgar as it is now, with vines climbing the support pillars and overrunning the Shinra tower, steel crumbling to rust as the earth reclaims its due. It's not just memory, or the theater of the mind played out on closed eyelids. It feels real. And the girl leaning against one of those pillars, arms crossed and smiling bright and mischievous, she feels real too. Tifa knows the difference between a delusion and a memory, a memory and a haunting. Cloud might doubt his mind from time to time, but she seldom does.

"What do you suppose it is she wants?" she asks, and the others frown at her - hearing something in her voice, perhaps, that she hadn't meant to put there. She tries to laugh and put Midgar out of her mind, but her mind is tangled with creeping vines, rich earth, a place that used to belong to humans and doesn't belong to anyone any longer. Barret gives her arm a comforting squeeze with his good hand, and says, "what makes you think she wants anything?"

"Ghosts always do, don't they? Otherwise they'd be gone."

"I think - " Cloud says, then trails off as their eyes turn in his direction. He scrubs a hand through his messy hair, looking almost sheepish, and it's easy to forget, in the face of all his habitual self-deprecation, that he knew Aeris best once, and maybe he still does.

"Yeah?" she asks, and he smiles lightly, like he's lost in memories of his own, more sweet this time than bitter.

"It's our world now," he says. "I think she wants us to make the best of it."

And somehow - thinking back to the girl Aeris had been, the ghost she became - Tifa doesn't think he's wrong.


End file.
